The end of September saw media agency UM host its inaugural Digital Boom summit in Cairo. The event was a gathering of technical and creative types to present their views on new media in Egypt, and it was obviously popular.
The organizers invited around 400 people, and around 800 showed up. Communicate has been to many similar events in Dubai, but few with that level of support. The crowd was largely made up of UM’s own staff, clients and associated agencies, but all were welcome. We saw nametags from several rival shops come to see what the fuss was about.
Speaking to Communicate at the event, UM Cairo’s managing director Dina Hashem said, “We know that the consumers are ahead of us in Egypt; we know that there are millions and millions of users of the Internet and digital media and we don’t know anything about them. That is what inspired this event.”
The local industry has long complained it doesn’t know enough about digital, she says. UM wanted to be thecatalyst that got everyone together to discuss it.
Speakers tossed about the usual slew of international examples and statistics (how fast Facebook has grown compared to TV and radio; the size of the social Web compared to China, and so on), but also dug up plenty of insight into the nascent Egyptian market.
Digital in Egypt is fairly recent, but that means marketers can leapfrog much of the owned media that made up Web 1.0. Speakers advocated jumping on the social networking bandwagon as it gathers speed.
Once you’re in, though, you’re in for the duration, said Omar Mandour, Coca-Cola’s general manager for Egypt, Libya and Sudan. “The minute you step in, you don’t back out,” he said. “Because if you back out you will lose your credibility, which will eventually reflect on your brand.”
In the two-way exchange of social media, brands must be prepared to face criticism from their public and act on it. “You had better understand that you are giving the consumer power,” adds Mandour. “If you don’t have the guts to reshape your strategy because consumers are telling you you’re not making sense, then don’t go in.”
Tim Baker, former regional general manager of media agency Initiative, and now managing director of digital shop Hug, agrees. “Building a fan base is a long-term strategy,” he says. “We don’t get into it for a month, look at the numbers and then forget about it.”
Assuming a brand is in for the digital long run, it still shouldn’t forget its traditional media. James Harris, UM’s head of digital for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told the audience that old and new media are inseparable. For example, we now read traditional magazines on our state-of-the-art iPads.
While marketers might still want to distinguish between digital and offline media, consumers just see all media as a way to get information and entertainment, he said. “We can’t really look at it as a jigsaw puzzle and say, ‘Let’s do television, let’s do outdoor, let’s do a little bit of digital, let’s separate them into pieces,’” said Harris. “Increasingly, digital is in everything we do. In every piece of traditional media, there is a link to digital, so we need to think of it as a fluid sort of mercury-type blob.”
Karim Khalifa, CEO of Digital Republic, said, “Digital media in isolation is not as powerful as digital media interlinked correctly, successfully, creatively, with traditional media. It’s not a case of necessarily having a 360-degrees campaign, with every single channel being used, but it’s about properly interlinking the right channels.”
Coke’s Mandour warned that whatever channels brands use, consumers will be a step ahead. For example, “Consumers are going to start dropping their usual laptops and going to surf the Net on their phones,” he said.
Mobinil’s manager of digital and direct communications, Rania El Bakry, also said youth in particular are not always where you expect them to be. “You can do a great media plan thinking that people watch this program because it’s a youth program, but they don’t want that,” she said. “They are not in the channels you think they are.”
Rather, they are on social networks and on mobiles. There’s an obvious interest in getting into these channels from Cairo’s media community, and if they are in it for the long run, there should be a bright, integrated digital future ahead of them.
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